Good morning, John. It is your younger but still quite old brother, Hank.

So sometime in the last ten years, it became pretty normal to talk about parasocial relationships. They've always been a thing. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with Gordon Gano and Helen Hunt. You can have a parasocial relationship with fictional characters. Sretch far back enough, people had parasocial relationships with, like, Zeus and Artemis. Define this term that I keep using: A parasocial relationship is basically when the parts of your brain that are designed to have a social relationship between you and another person are used to just have a relationship with a person who does not know who you are or cannot know who you are because they are Huckleberry Finn, who was not—for clarity—a real person.

John, you and I always have big talks about all of the things that we do and how weird it is. Something that we've been talking a lot about didn't really fall into place until I heard Brittany Broski say this on Colin and Samir's Show.

Brittany Broski: Having such an intense parasocial relationship, honestly from my end and from their end because I'm parasocially attached to them in a different way than they sort of look to me for a pick-me-up or for content or for the big sister vibe. Every decision I make is for them. I don't wanna have them be mad at me or be unhappy with the content I'm putting out. I think it's unacceptable to not be attached to your audience.

I have always known that I have a very strong, very real, very important relationship with the people who I do not know who consume this content. Just like you can have a relationship with a character in a book, I have a parasocial relationship with this thing that I have created in my head. I have invented it and it is a thing that I can never fully know or understand and I call it Nerdfighteria. Now, this is a parasocial relationship but it's not usually what we mean when we say "parasocial relationship" 'cause it's going in the other direction. And there's not really a word for that, but yesterday, when you and I were talking about this on the phone, you, John, called it a "Sarapocial relationship"—which is--got to be the best possible term.

So to talk about it for a sec, this is obviously a very tricky relationship to maintain. First of all, because check this out, the people who make up this community are different people. They have different upbringings and they live in different places and they have different values and they care about different things, but also, they are more similar to each other than, like, the broader body of humanity. There are some things that tie us together. There is a core and I don't know what holds the core together, but the things that hold the core together are important and I think about them a lot and I try to understand it by talking to people in the real world, by reading comments, by doing the Nerdfighteria Census. And the building of an understanding of what ties us together, like, what is exciting, what is unexpected and expected, what is unacceptable. That is a constant thrumming in my brain that informs everything that I make. Also, I can't control the core but I do, like, want things for the core. I want it to be strong and dense and capable and what does that mean? Strong, I guess. Just like that there's shared values that do knit it together and even when there's conflict, you check back in on those values and you can say, "Well, we're disagreeing about this thing, but this thing we still agree about."

Density, for me, means that there are lots of different shared things. Like, maybe not everybody shares the same things but there are lots of different things that we do share and those things are not found often or as much outside of the core. So like, they're special things. And I want those things to be like unassailably good and some of those things you can control. Like, the average nerdfighter is going to know a lot more about tuberculosis and pelicans and AFC Wimbledon than the average human. But some of those things are gonna, like, arise naturally. Like, the number of trans or non-binary nerdfighters is much higher than the general population. The number of people who voted for Donald Trump is much lower than the general population. We didn't set out to have a lot of non-binary people in the space or exclude Trump voters, it just happened naturally.

The last adjective I use and I--literally this was off the top of my head, so there's plenty of other things I could say here but is capable. And by capable, I think you know what it means, like, the the most interesting and best part of being, uh, a part of this thing is that it can do things for itself and for the world. I want it to feel valuable to be a member of this community because it is, and I want it to feel like this community can do stuff together whether that's increase access to tuberculosis treatments and tests or it's Crash Course, SciShow or the Awesome Socks and Awesome Coffee Clubs, uh, raising lots of money to increase access to maternal healthcare in Sierra Leone. And a lot of those things have this core as their foundation, but then can grow way beyond that and do way more good in the world than they could if they--if it never left the core. That's capable, that's amazing, that's powerful. But also, did you see this coming, there are hard parts.

I have, for a long time now, considered myself to be not mine. Between this relationship, uh, and also relationship, like the obligation to various companies and other stakeholders of those companies, and then of course my family and my friends. Parts of myself that were for me, I lost. I'd lost them. Now for clarity, I think it is very important and an absolute good to share a great deal of yourself. I think that a self shared is a much more rich existence than a self that is only for one's self. But it's also good to have some self left for the self and that was something that other people always forced me into rather than something that I would do voluntarily. That has changed some since I got sick for reasons that you could probably guess at, which I think is probably healthy. 

Something else that makes a sarapocial relationship hard, I've already kind of referred to but it's that there's a bunch of different people and sometimes they're gonna disagree with each other and so you have a relationship with a thing that doesn't agree with itself, which can also sometimes happen when you just have a relationship with a person. Sometimes I don't agree with myself. Part of the center might think that it is absolutely ludicrous for someone to spend a lot of time on on TikTok, which is a strange organization to
let have a huge amount of data about you. And I understand that a piece of the core would feel that way and a piece of the core would disagree. I think the core has disagreed about how and whether to
separate art from the person who created that art, but you got to hold space for the reality that disagreement is okay and normal and in fact, healthy. Like, if every single person agreed on every single thing, I think we'd have a problem.

And like, one thing that we've talked about before, John, is that like you and I don't feel comfortable being the deciding voice of that, of saying like, "Okay, we're having a disagreement. Here's the solution." Because one, I don't trust myself enough to wield that power and
two, the people who disagree with us would then feel alienated and unwelcome in a place that they love.

All this is to say: This is a thing. And it's weird, it's more common now than it ever has been, uh, because of the structure of the internet. And I'm grateful to Britanny and you, John, for helping me think through all of it. Even after all these years, I--like, I'm still am working on it like I still am confused by it and it's hard. And I think, like, the sarapocial relationship is actually a much bigger deal than the parasocial relationship in that person's life 'cause it's not just a relationship, it is also, like, a job. It's like an ever-present thing in my mind. Everything I do is informed by it. Not everything, thank goodness, but like, everything public.

Now I do not know whether to attribute this to the initial values that we started out with or to our constant stressing about it or to pure dumb luck or to the individual people who make up the community or just all of the above. But we have a tremendous core. Like, we have one of the most interesting cores out there. Maybe the most interesting, most effective, like, there's probably some competition but it doesn't feel like that to me. I could not wish for a better group of people to be in this with, even if it is weird and confusing sometimes.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.